Become An Idea Distillery
When you think about a distillery you probably think of a quality bourbon or whisk(e)y where a master distiller chooses the best ingredients, adds heat, allows it to age, and then pours that precious essence into bottles for consumers to share and savor. I think this same general process can be used for taking imaginative ideas and distilling them down into a purer essence of a concept which can be shared and savored with clients.
Serve As A Master Distiller Of Ideas
Be the one who collects all the raw concepts submitted by committees and brainstorm groups and employee suggestion boxes and customer feedback cards and sift through them to find the best ingredients you can use in your idea distilling process.
Set those ingredients aside and allow them some time to “ferment” inside your mind. Take a few days or a week for some of the ideas to mash-up with the others, for the stronger concepts to influence the weaker ones, and for the best flavors to emerge.
Next, add a little heat and begin to boil this mash of ideas down to their essence. Apply the heat of concept evaluation, available budget, ability to meet any important deadlines, and the marketability of the idea itself in order to burn off impurities until you have it reduced to a single solid concept that you can easily explain and share with others.
The final step in this idea distillation is aging. You now need to let the idea mature a bit in order to see how it might be accepted by people outside the distillery, how it will be embraced by the public, and if the solution is still relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve. If so, bottle it up and take it to market!
